Author
Topic: EGA combat icons (Read 18035 times)

Hi! First of all I have to confess that I have minimal experience with FRUA. I had some fun with it roughly ten years ago, but I lacked the persistence and the language skills to complete even a minor quest. Though I always played with the thought of creating some modules with it, this will probably not happen.

But.

My primary hobby is pixeling, and as I neglected it the last few years I decided that I will practice every day this year. Long story short I set a target for this year (and for the last three weeks of the past year): pixeling daily a new a Gold Box-like EGA combat icon. I thought I share those here, maybe someone can use some of them...

I use a slightly altered perspective (total side-view), and the icons probably have to adapted to the FRUA restraints. All of the icons were planed to be displayed in a classic Gold Box combat, thus some might be outer-AA-ed to dark gray (so doesn't look that nice on light backgrounds).

P.S. Rolled "Z" for the next week, so any nice monster ideas with Z are also welcome... (Zhentarims, Zebra hybrids, Zorbo, Zygraat and a Zodar is all I could find)

I'd like to get a good look at these, but can't really see them. Is there a link where I can download them and look at them? If I try to download the GIF file, it tells me that the file is corrupt or has bad headers. I've tried to open it in several programs.

Ben, i copied the image link, went to the photobucket site, copied the image, and pasted into my paint program to view it. I could not save as from the linked image, either, without getting a bad file header.

Nope. Still getting "File Format Cannot Be Opened" or "Image Cannot Be Opened" in nearly everything I try to open it with (Photoshop, Irfanview, Windows Image Viewer, Windows 8 Photo App, Paint, etc). I don't have any issues with any other PNG files. Not sure what the issue is. Anyone else having any luck?

EDIT:After about seven times downloading it, it finally started working. Not sure what's going on with that, but it did eventually download in a format that is usable. Just in case anyone else is having issues, I'll upload it here to the forums so that you can grab it easier:

For a proper EGA palette in UA, I used the "Always" palette, rather than the usual "Icons" palette. This palette can be found in the two extra Dungeon .pcx files I included in the "xtra_art" folder of that mod.

Perhaps you might like playing my hacked, all-EGA-graphics mod, "Kill the Heroes of Phlan" (ega.zip).

Just wanted to point out that if you are a fan of Gold-Box games and a fan of Pool of Radiance, the game mentioned in the quote is:ESSENTIAL, a MUST-PLAY, that you should DOWNLOAD IMMEDIATELY.Hope I'm being clear on my point...

For a proper EGA palette in UA, I used the "Always" palette, rather than the usual "Icons" palette. This palette can be found in the two extra Dungeon .pcx files I included in the "xtra_art" folder of that mod.

Thanks! Sadly I already converted everything to the icons palette, as I read your comment, so I had to re-palette all of them. But there they are.

I quickly tried your mod, but after the first event I was teleported to a position where I should have not been teleported in my opinion. As I mentioned, I'm rather inexperienced with FRUA, so it's possible I messed up something.

Before you go too far, I should warn you there is no way, as far as I know, to add a 3x2 tall combat icon to FRUA (though the code does exist for 3x2 wide icons, and this has been done). Which is a pity, as your whatever-that-big-guy-is looks really, really cool.

Now here is an idea for the graphically-gifted.

As I recall, the EGA palette was 16 colors, but it didn't have to be the same 16 colors--that was just a convenience. So you could make icons (and other things) using a *different* set of 16 colors in different parts of the game--more blue and green underwater, more red and orange on the Plane of Fire, purple and orange for weirdness, or perhaps rotate the hues 30 degrees on the hue chart to the midpoints between the standard primaries for a 'subtly wrong' look.

As I recall, the EGA palette was 16 colors, but it didn't have to be the same 16 colors--that was just a convenience. So you could make icons (and other things) using a *different* set of 16 colors in different parts of the game--more blue and green underwater, more red and orange on the Plane of Fire, purple and orange for weirdness, or perhaps rotate the hues 30 degrees on the hue chart to the midpoints between the standard primaries for a 'subtly wrong' look.

Before you go too far, I should warn you there is no way, as far as I know, to add a 3x2 tall combat icon to FRUA (though the code does exist for 3x2 wide icons, and this has been done). Which is a pity, as your whatever-that-big-guy-is looks really, really cool.

Yeah, that's why the tall icon is there. I just wanted to make one in true scale. It was real fun.

As I recall, the EGA palette was 16 colors, but it didn't have to be the same 16 colors--that was just a convenience. So you could make icons (and other things) using a *different* set of 16 colors in different parts of the game--more blue and green underwater, more red and orange on the Plane of Fire, purple and orange for weirdness, or perhaps rotate the hues 30 degrees on the hue chart to the midpoints between the standard primaries for a 'subtly wrong' look.

True. You could use it for effects, but level-dependent palettes will be hard to achieve most of the time. If you want to keep the player sprites consistent, then you have to lock the palette entries used for them, reducing the dynamic palette part drastically. I really don't understand the popularity of the standard palette (though weirdly I like it too). Some colors are too similar, too much saturation, to few hues. Not made by pixel artists for sure.